The Google Glass Travel App That May Succeed at Being Useful

Skift Take

Instant translation with seamless back-and-forth communication in any language is the holy grail and wearables should theoretically enable it. The Word Lens app for Google Glass is the first useful step towards it.

— Rafat Ali

Maybe the glassholes will actually have something useful to brag about: a new app from the makers of super useful Word Lens. The “Word Lens for Glass” app is now available for Google Glass, and it moves beyond the gimmick to something that may actually be useful in international travels. The Glass app, like the more well known mobile app, translates signs, direction markers, or any other foreign language text users are looking at — and will translate it word by word.

It isn’t as great or efficient as Google Translate, which takes tons of other factors –including context — into account. But for quick and dirty and more importantly instant translation the Word Lens’ Glass app has a great use case.

According to AllThingsD, “the app works in real time, and it also accesses local storage. A dictionary of about 10,000 words in each chosen language are stored locally on the device, so users can get their translations even when they travel internationally without a data plan. That’s in contrast to Google’s own Google Goggles app, which requires a Web connection.”

The app was built with the new Glass Developer Kit, which was released last week.